Author: Lisa Nicholas, Ph. D.
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In the previous installment in this series on the Great Flood in the literary tradition, we saw that the Biblical flood story, unlike its analogs in pagan literature, emphasizes the God who saves, rather than on the man who is saved. The survival of Moses and his family is part of a pattern that marks the relations of God and Man. We’ll come back to that later, but today I want to take a closer look at the man who is saved from the divine destruction that wipes out the rest of humankind.

Unlike the gods of pagan lore, the God of Genesis remains steadfast in his loving Providence. The rainbow is the sign that He keeps his promises.

All three ancient writers were interpreting the same primeval events, trying to probe the same mystery to answer the question: Why? Why would God (the gods) cause or allow such a cataclysmic event as a worldwide flood? And why would He (they) save one particular man while allowing everyone and everything else to perish? The answer to the first question in all three cases is similar: God (the gods) was displeased with the way mankind had turned out, and thought it better to wipe the slate clean, rather than to allow things to go on as they had. Thus the deluge.

WHY THIS MAN?

In the answer to the second question, however, we see more clearly how the perspectives and the intentions of the three writers differ.

The Mesopotamian poet who composed the Epic of Gilgamesh lived in an age when the power of kings made them seem different from ordinary men, almost like gods. He imagined that the man who was saved must have been a powerful king, like Gilgamesh himself. Why else would any god even have noticed him, much less cared enough about him to save him? So Utnapishtim, a godlike king, is given the means to save himself and those of his household, thanks to one god’s warning. Yet the council of the gods as a whole are displeased with his survival and he is “rewarded” by being forced into a godlike, unending exile, far from the new human race that re-peoples the earth. It is almost as if the gods have said to him, “Ha! Think you’re special? Think you can fool us, as if you were one of us? Let’s see how you like living in godlike isolation from mere mortals.” And, as we know, Utnapishtim did not like it much at all. The blessing seemed more like a curse, and this was what he tried to convey to Gilgamesh, striving vainly for godlike immortality.

Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses in a very different age, for a very different audience. He and his readers were jaded sophisticates who probably regarded the Graeco-Roman pantheon of gods as more of a metaphor than a literal reality. We know that Ovid was also at odds with the overweening ruler of his day, and embedded in his poem a warning against rulers who act as if they are gods. In the Metamporphoses, the gods are capricious, often monstrous, in their dealings with mere mortals, particularly in the decision of Jupiter to erase mankind and all living things from the face of the earth. Still, Ovid knew that someone must have survived the flood, two individuals whom his own mythic tradition identified as Deukalion and Pyrrha. The fund of myth from which Ovid drew his story material made it clear that these two were no “mere” mortals, they were demigods, each the offspring of a divine father (the Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus). This, however, did not make them un-killable. They barely survived in their tiny, unprovisioned boat, and only fate preserved them long enough to find themselves stranded on a mountaintop as the flood waters finally receded. In Ovid’s account, no divine hand saves them, but only dumb luck. They survived because they were tough old birds. How fitting, then, that they should restore the human race from stones, so that their posterity would be as tough as stones to survive the vicissitudes of gods and kings.

What about Noah, then? An ordinary man, neither king nor hero, distinguished only by being a “righteous” man, one who didn’t engage in the excesses and depravities of other men. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. […] But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” (Genesis 65-6, 8, RSV-CE). We know that Noah was a family man, with three married sons whom he had raised also to be righteous men. Certainly they were obedient and respectful of their father and cooperated fully with his project to build the huge vessel that we know as the Ark. So Noah is a moral man, a decent chap who behaves as the Lord God intends mankind to behave. He is a good apple, whom God plucks out of a barrel full of rotten apples.

Despite being 600 years old, Noah did not balk at constructing the Ark.

Noah was not outstanding as the world measures such things — not a king nor a demigod — but this story is not being told from a human perspective. God’s judgment, not human judgment, is the measure of a man in this story. As we saw last time, even Joe Blow, our naive reader, could see that Genesis is all about how God views mankind, how He works patiently to remold the human race into something pleasing to Him. As often as human beings deviate from His plan for them (and they’ve done that from the very beginning), he provides a course correction for those who are willing to follow his instructions. Noah, clearly, is one of these. When God says, “Build a gigantic ship and fill it with samples of every living thing,” Noah doesn’t say, “How can I possibly?” Or “What’s in it for me?” Instead, he simply does “all that the Lord commanded Him” — without trying to “improve” on the divine instructions, as Utnapishtim did. Noah alone, of all his generation, obeys the commands of the Lord, and this is what saves him. Not fame, not worldly power or wealth, not divine parentage, but simple obedience to the Lord who made him. He is not godlike, but he is godly.

These simple acts of obedience bear an enormous benefit, not only for the man Noah, but for all living things. Through the obedience of this one man, all of human posterity and every living thing upon the earth is given a fresh, new chance. The slate, truly, has been wiped clean. When the flood waters subside and God instructs Noah to venture out onto dry land, He says to him, as he had said to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” But He goes farther this time, telling Noah:

“Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Genesis 9:9-11, RSV-CE)

And He leaves the sign of the rainbow as a reminder of this unbreakable promise.

NO ONE IS PERFECT BUT GOD ALONE

Immediately after this, Genesis shows us that human nature may have been given a fresh chance, but it has not been changed. Man can still go astray. Noah, the righteous man, is far from perfect. Now, lording it over the earth as the patriarch of the renewed human race and as the first “tiller of the soil,” celebrating the ability to grow his own food rather than living off of what God provides, Noah literally becomes intoxicated with power, overindulging in the fruit of the vine his hand has planted. He falls down drunk — and naked.

Prelapsarian nakedness is shameful in a post-diluvian world.

Really? This man was the best of all mankind, the only one worth saving? How quickly he has fallen from the heights of virtue. Even worse, he now seems to think himself godlike rather than godly, for when his sons cover his nakedness to shield him from shame, Noah rouses from his drunkenness long enough to curse one and bless the other, a godlike prerogative hitherto unclaimed by the humbler, antediluvian Noah.

Not so godlike, perhaps, because the true God remembers his covenant and does not punish Noah or his posterity. Noah lives on for three hundred and fifty years after the flood, long enough to see the prosperity of his sons and his sons’ sons, until the earth is filled with his offspring.

If Noah had been the hero of this story, the author might well have pruned out the unflattering account of his drunkenness. Why leave it in? First, I believe, to show precisely this: that Noah is not a hero, but an ordinary man. When he trusts in the power of God, he is saved; when he grows drunk with his own power, he falls into disgrace. Second, the author reminds us that Noah is just one man among many in the long history of mankind — he dies, and life goes on. After him there will be good men and bad and, often enough, there will be good men who go bad and wicked men who repent. What does not change is God and His determination to give Mankind another chance, and another, and another. The rest of Genesis, the “prehistory” of mankind, shows this pattern of God repeatedly rewarding those who trust in Him and allowing those who do not to fall through their own wickedness.

WHAT IS A HERO?

Here, then is the great difference between the book of Genesis and the poems of the Gilgamesh poet and Roman Ovid: the hero of the story is God Himself.He it is who must patiently endure the vicissitudes of Man, rather than the other way around. He has the upper hand, yet He uses it only to correct, not to torment. He alone remains true to His promises. The man who would be godlike must be like God in this: His steadfast love for humankind.

Next time, this perspective will become clearer as we situate the story of Noah and the flood in the larger context of the Bible and, particularly, the role that typology plays in understanding the Bible as a whole and this story in particular.

When I started this reading exercise that I call “adventures in comparative mythology,” nearly two years ago, I said that one of the things I hoped to achieve was to get readers to be able to read the story of the Flood in the Bible “with fresh eyes.” So let’s imagine someone doing just that — picking up the Bible for the first time and reading this story, much as we have read the flood accounts in the two long, narrative works we’ve already examined, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Metamorphoses.

You’re never at a loss for great reading, if there’s a Bible on the nightstand.

Let’s give our reader a name — Joe Blow — and an occupation – a traveling salesman. Joe spends a lot of times in hotel rooms — cheap hotel rooms, at that, where the TV is often out of order, so he does a lot of reading and thinking. He has read, for instance, the Epic of Gilgamesh (better than anything on TV!) and even Ovid’s Metamorphoses (it was free on Kindle). Tonight, Joe checks into his motel and flips through 72 cable channels of nothing, berating himself for leaving his Kindle at home on this trip. After a long day of trying to convince people to buy more widgets, he needs something to read before bedtime. So he rummages around in the bedside table and finds a Gideons’ Bible. He has heard of the Bible, of course, but this is the first time he has cracked the cover on one.

God and Man in Genesis

He flips past the table of contents, the introduction, and all the other boring front matter, looking for the beginning of the story. And there it is – chapter 1, Genesis. The beginning of… everything. When the story starts, there is nothing and no one except God. God speaks and says, “Light!” And there is light, where before there was nothing. Who is God talking to when He speaks? Himself. There isn’t anyone else yet. He is thinking aloud. He is pronouncing facts, which come to be even as He says them.

So speaking things into being — that’s one of God’s super-powers, which He uses to create an orderly – and good – world. Joe knows it’s good because, after He makes each thing, God admires His own work and says, “That’s good.” After He has created the heavens and the earth, the sea and the land, all sorts of vegetation and animals – all good – He makes a Man and a Woman, and these two are good, as well, made in the very image of God. God is so pleased with them that He gives them all the other good things He has made. It’s all good! So He takes a rest.

Joe figures he’ll go to bed, too. Maybe he’ll read some more tomorrow night, to find out what else God does, after His rest.

The next night, Joe returns to his motel room, flops back onto the bed, and picks up the Bible again. He thought he had marked the place where he left off last night, but when he resumes reading tonight, he has to double check the bookmark, because the next part is the story of creation all over again. This time, when God makes the man, He breathes His own life into him. Then He makes the woman to be the man’s companion. God gives the pair complete freedom in the beautiful world He has made, even though you might expect Him to want to keep it, since it’s so good and beautiful. (Pretty cushy set-up, Joe thinks. They’ll never have to work for a living or sleep on lumpy motel mattresses.)

But they manage to mess things up right away. God warned these two brand-new people that, although they have all of creation to lord over — and it’s all good stuff — eating fruit of one particular tree will make them know not only good but also evil. So, of course, that’s the first thing they do. Pretty stupid move, Joe thinks, but that’s human nature, ain’t it? And who could help but listen to a talking snake, anyway?

Hanging out in the Garden, before the friendship soured.

It turns out God was not kidding (neither was the snake) when He said that, once they tried the forbidden fruit, the man and woman would know evil as well as good. Bad things start to happen to them — and not just them, but their sons as well. And the next generation, and the next … (Joe knows that every decent story runs on conflict, and suddenly there’s plenty of it). Things get worse and worse until everything gets so bad that God (Joe had kind of forgotten about Him) asks Himself why He ever thought making free human beings was a good idea. The world of man has become a stinking mess, so God decides to cause a great flood that will wash away all the badness …

Joe stops and puts the book down for a minute. This sounds a lot like a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. That story also started with a god making the world (although it didn’t really say much about the first man and woman). And later on, there was a god (a different one?) who didn’t like the way human beings were behaving, so he decided to destroy them all with a flood. Hmm, is there some plagiarism going on here?

He reads ahead to see if things turn out the same in this version: sure enough, one man and his wife survive the flood, which wipes out everything else. Unlike Deukalion and Pyrrha in Ovid’s story, though, this man, Noah, is warned ahead of time about the coming flood. God wants Noah to survive, so He tells him how to build a boat that will allow him and his family to live through the flood. So now Noah sounds more like Utnapishtim than Deukalion. God even tells him to put all kinds of animals in the boat, so that they’ll survive, too, just as Ea instructed Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And, like Utnapishtim, Noah uses birds to find dry land, after the flood waters start to recede.

At this point, Joe wonders if whoever wrote the story of Noah was just creating a mash-up of the other two – there are so many details in common, some like the Gilgamesh story and others like the one in Metamorphoses. But he remembers that the authors of those two flood stories seemed to be getting at different meanings — one was saying that human beings shouldn’t try to be immortal like the gods, and the other emphasized that you’ve got to be tough if you’re going to survive all the trouble that the gods throw at you.

This Bible story doesn’t seem to be saying either of those things. Instead of either sending Noah away into exile, as Enlil did Utnapishtim, or leaving him to figure stuff out on his own, as the gods did in the Metamorphoses, in this story God gives the Earth to Noah, as clean and good as it was in the beginning, and He makes a covenant with Noah and his descendants, promising never to flood the Earth that way again. He even gives him a sign to remind them of His promise. That’s something Joe never saw in the other stories — in those, the gods never would have bothered to try to make friends with mortals. And God keeps his promise, even though Noah gets falling-down drunk right after God saves him. (Wasn’t drunken revelry one of the things that convinced God that most of humankind should be washed away?)

a rocky friendship

Noah and his sons gaze at the rainbow, a sign of God’s faithfulness

Joe reads on to the end of Genesis, noticing that this covenant God makes with Noah is just one of many. From time to time, things turn bad and God has to clean up another mess, but He keeps His promise about not flooding the Earth again. But no matter how bad people get, God keeps making new covenants with them, and sometimes human characters even make a covenant with each other, as if that’s something they’ve learned from God.

When he gets to the end of Genesis, Joe is still trying to figure out if this story has a hero, or if it’s just one of those generational sagas where, right when you get interested in one character, the next thing you know you’re reading all about his great-great grandson. As he puzzles over this, he realizes it might be both. It’s certainly a human story, but there’s not really any single human protagonist. It’s more as if the whole human race were the protagonist, except that every time one of them starts acting like he’s in charge, God reminds him that they are all secondary characters in the overarching plot — God’s plan for humankind.

In fact, the more he thinks about it, the clearer it becomes to Joe what the big difference is between this story and the other two ancient accounts of a Great Flood. In the others, the gods seemed to regard human beings as insignificant, pests even, whom they try to exterminate by flooding the whole Earth. But in Genesis, God floods the Earth to save the decent people (Noah and his family) from all the filthy behavior of the others. He cleans things up and then puts Noah and his family back in charge — pretty much the way He had done with the first man and woman back at the beginning, when everything was good. Back when God walked with them in the Garden.

Then it hits Joe — this is a story about a friendship. A pretty rocky friendship, where one friend is faithful and forgiving, and the other is pretty fickle, but some friendships are like that. In this story, though, the faithful friend never gives up — no matter how many times the fickle friend acts like a jerk, the faithful one is ready, not only to forgive, but to make new promises of faithful friendship. Joe scratches his head. How realistic is that? Shouldn’t it be the fickle friend who promises to be good in the future, not the good friend? And why would anyone in his right mind keep taking back someone who has ignored him and done him dirt so many times?

Maybe putting up with a lot of bad behavior from His friends is another of God’s super-powers. And the fickle friend? Well, that’s a lot of people, maybe all of them. You might say that the fickle friend is Man with a capital M. But while some individuals in this story seem to be truly rotten, taken altogether humankind is not totally faithless, because they keep trying to get back into God’s good graces, even after they’ve really messed up. This thought reminds Joe of a scene right at the end of Genesis, when Joseph, the son of Jacob, faces his brothers (who had sold him into slavery when he was a youngster). Now that he is an important man, right-hand man to the Pharoah, they are trembling with fear that he will his revenge on them. But he says, “Don’t be afraid. All the evil that you intended, God has used to bring about good. So I won’t hold it against you, either.” Joseph, at least, has learned to be faithful to his brothers, even when they don’t seem to deserve it. So even though he says, “Who am I, God?” he really does seem a little bit like Him. A faithful friend, even when others are fickle.

Joe closes the book for the night. Why didn’t anyone ever tell him that the Bible was a buddy story? Because if the first chapter is anything to go on, that’s exactly what it is.

Next time: the Flood in the context of the whole Bible

We’ll let Joe get some sleep now. Next time, we’ll see if he’s right about this being a buddy story, by examining how the Flood account relates to the meaning of the Bible as a whole. If you’re not as well-read as Joe, you can catch up by reading the earlier part of this series, about the flood stories in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Just click the link below.

There is a figure in Greek mythology called Proteus, a minor sea god with two remarkable powers: shape-shifting and oracular utterance. To get the truth out of him, however, one must first catch him. When anyone attempts to grasp him, he rapidly changes from one form into another in an attempt to evade his captor’s clutches. But if a person is tenacious enough to hold on until Proteus tires and resolves into his true form, the god will render up the truth his captor seeks.
Orally transmitted stories share with this mythical sea god a “protean” character. Handed on by word of mouth, each time a story is told the teller gives it a slightly different form and a different shade of meaning, so that over time many different versions of the same story emerge. The literary author who works from an oral tradition is like the hero who captures Procrustes: first he must wrestle with the many versions of the story, but when he finally confers upon it a fixed form, he is able to make it serve him to convey a particular truth.

Taken out of context, the accounts of a great flood that nearly destroyed all living things bear a striking similarity to one another. But in this blog series, I’ve taken pains to put each story in its proper context, in order to see what meaning each writer found in it. I hope that, having looked at the meaning in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we will now be able to see more clearly what makes the Biblical story of the Great Flood stand out from the others. First, though, it might be good to recap what we have learned about the significance of the Flood as it is presented in the other two poems.

Gilgamesh grasps at immortality, but seizes on wisdom

We saw that the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh is presented by Utnapishtim as an object lesson for Gilgamesh, to dissuade him from his mad pursuit of immortality. Gilgamesh, a great king who is “two-thirds divine, and one-third man,” becomes obsessed with immortality after the death of his great friend, Enkidu. Enkidu, struck down by the gods, shares death-bed visions of what awaits him after this mortal life: a great nothingness of rotting bodies and oblivion, something the immortal gods will never suffer. In his determination to escape this dismal fate, Gilgamesh abandons his city to seek out the only man who has ever escaped death, Utnapishtim. A god bestowed immortality on him after he and his wife survived the gods’ destructive flood, but what was intended as a blessing turns out to be a kind of curse. Forced to live far from mortal men, an outcast from the restored human race, Utnapishtim lives an unnatural life of never-ending loneliness. Although he intends to story to dissuade the king from seeking a similar fate, Gilgamesh is not immediately convinced. Eventually, though, he becomes reconciled to the inescapable brevity of human life. This knowledge is the only lasting trophy that he takes with him as he returns to the great city over which he reigns. From now on, he will seek immortality only through the lasting nature of his kingly achievements.

The enduring human spirit

In contrast to the crude but powerful Gilgamesh epic, Ovid’s lengthy poem, Metamorphoses, written nearly two thousand years later, is both more finely wrought and apparently less philosophical. A careless modern reader might easily dismiss Ovid’s poem as an artful mishmash of Graeco-Roman mythology, with an emphasis on erotic love. By focusing on one small section of the rambling poem, however, we saw that there is a more serious, philosophical theme pervading the poem just below its artful surface. Ovid’s account of the Great Flood suggests both the cruelty and capriciousness of the gods — a theme amply illustrated throughout the poem — and the human virtue that allows mere mortals to endure the vicissitudes of life.

In order to emphasize this meaning of the flood story, Ovid leaves out an important detail that most earlier versions of the myth included: he does not say that Deucalion and Pyrrha owe their survival to the forewarning of Deucalion’s immortal father, Prometheus, nor that Prometheus instructed them to build a great chest and fill it with provisions to sustain them after every other source of food has been destroyed by the flood. Instead, Ovid makes it seem as if nothing more than a divine whim ends the flood before they too, last of all mortals, perish in the waters that have destroyed every other living thing.

While the poet, on the one hand, suppresses this important detail, on the other hand he emphasizes another, namely the way the elderly couple replenish the world’s human population. So that the reader does not miss the point, the poet interprets the significance of their producing offspring from stones: “[Thus} the toughness of our race, our ability to endure hard labour, and the proof we give of the source from which we are sprung.” In this way, he harmonizes the meaning of the Flood story with the overall theme of the poem: life consists of constant change, but we mortals, whose life is short and at the mercy of the gods’ fickle affections, are tough enough to endure it all.

We can see that both of these poems, so different from one another, share a preoccupation with human mortality. In fact, in the understanding of the ancient world, mortality was the one characteristic that distinguished men from gods. Both poems suggest that the way to get the most out of life is to accept our human limitations and learn to rejoice in them. We are not gods, nor should we seek to be — how much better to be the best kind of humans!

Next time: A distinctive view of Man and God

In the next post, we’ll look at the Book of Genesis, which provides the immediate context for the Biblical story of of Noah and the Flood. When we do, it will be clear that the Biblical author, working from the same fund orally-transmitted myths that provided story elements for the Babylonian Gilgamesh poet and Roman Ovid, draws a radically different meaning out of them. Perhaps that meaning will help to explain why the story of Noah continues to capture the modern imagination, while the tales of Deucalion and Utnapishtim remain relics of cultures long since lost in the dust of time.

As this article from Slate acknowledges, very few concrete facts about Ireland’s patron saint have survived. Much that we think we know is merely legend. Keeping that in mind, did you ever wonder why Saint Patrick is credited with expelling snakes (not wolves, not badgers, not even demons) from the Emerald Isle?

I’m not going to dispute whether holy Padraic literally chased serpentine creatures from Ireland, but you have to admit that on a symbolic level the story is apt. Serpents have a long history in Christian iconography, representing the deceptions of the devil. As an early missionary to the island, the fifth-century monk we know as St Patrick was successful in converting many from their pagan superstitions, and for more than a millennium Ireland was known as one of the most thoroughly Catholic lands upon Earth. Since pagan gods have long been regarded as being inspired by fallen angels, who presented themselves as deities, there could be no more appropriate legend about the Christian monk who persuaded the Irish people to abandon their old beliefs and turn to the One True God, than to have him expel the snakes from Ireland.

Ireland, alas, seems determined to put its Catholic heritage behind it. This article on the site of the Irish broadcasting company, RTE, for instance, seems bent on debunking the idea that there ever were snakes in Ireland for Patrick to expel. It doesn’t really matter, though, whether there were any serpentine species native to the island of Ireland, since the legend’s power is in the spiritual truth it seeks to convey, rather than literal fact.

St Patrick stood for truth, shedding abroad in the ignorance of pagan hearts the Light of Christ. And today, despite the coming of a new spring, sometimes lately it seems that the world is getting a bit darker every day. When that happens, it’s time to put on the armor of light! For Saint Patrick’s Day, take a look at this old post, wherein you will find the wonderful prayer known as Saint Patrick’s Breastplate: Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! Now Arm Yourselves!

If you’re already familiar with the hymn based on that prayer, you might like this very different musical rendition of the ancient prayer by that name:

Please leave your thoughts or comments below!

I left the discussion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by saying (as I often do) that, in literature, context is everything. We can’t really grasp the significance of Ovid’s version of the Great Flood unless we consider it in the context of the poem as a whole. So what is this poem really about? How does the early episode that recounts the Great Flood contribute to the overall meaning, and how does the overall meaning color the significance of the Flood account?

The constancy of change

The title hints at the poem’s meaning. Metamorphoses covers all of history (and prehistory), starting with the creation of the world and ending in Ovid’s present day. What might seem, upon a first reading, a rather aimless stitching together of innumerable ancient myths is actually a very careful selection which is tied together by a single commonality: the metamorphoses themselves, one thing being changed into another. Most of these metamorphoses show the gods turning human beings into various non-human things – dolphins, trees, stars, you name it. And why do they do this? In large part, because gods are selfish, possessive – and immortal. When a god desires permanent possession of a mortal person, he (or she) can achieve that permanence only through change – by turning the unfortunate mortal object of his desire into something that can never die. In other words, the key to permanence is change itself.

In case we have missed this point, in the final segment of the poem, King Numa, the successor of Romulus, the founder of Rome, listens to a long lecture by Pythagoras on the idea that flux (change) is the principle on which the whole cosmos is founded: things change into other things. Living things turn into dead things, the dead things decay (more change), the seasons change, everything changes. (The gods may be immortal, but they change their minds constantly.) Change is the one constant in the universe. Numa absorbs this lesson and returns to Rome, changed by the experience, a wiser man for having listened to Pythagoras. Then one king is changed for another, and so on through history, until Julius Caesar himself is murdered in the Senate and gets changed into a god (also a shooting star).

Putting kingship into perspective

This brings us to another theme emphasized in the final two books of the poem, the question of kingship (which, coincidentally, also preoccupied the writer of the Epic of Gilgamesh). Book XIV ends with the death and apotheosis of Rome’s founder, Romulus, while XV ends with the death and divinization of his eventual successor (700 years later), Julius Caesar. Julius, of course, was the adoptive father of the man who came to be known as Caesar Augustus, ruler of Rome in Ovid’s day. There was every expectation that Augustus might also claim divinity, perhaps even before his death. (I said a bit more about this in this post.)

Romulus assumed into the pantheon of the gods

But would this be a good thing, for Rome or for Augustus? Perhaps not. Becoming a god means no longer being a man – which creates a vacancy in the ruler’s seat. Both Romulus and Julius Caesar disappeared at the moment they were assumed into the pantheon of the gods, thereby creating political and social instability – the last thing Ovid’s contemporaries wanted, after thirty years of bloody civil war. The poem ends with what seems to be praise of Augustus but is actually a rather ominous warning. The poet says, in effect, “And now Augustus is ruler! The gods only know how long it will be until he, too, leaves earth to assume his place in the heavens. Let’s hope that he has a long reign before that happens.”

So the poem leaves us thinking about both the constancy of change and the ephemeral nature of kingship. In the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, you should recall, Utnapishtim warned King Gilgamesh against desiring to be made immortal like the gods. Gilgamesh had to be content with “immortalizing” himself by creating works that would long outlive him, giving him undying fame. Ovid’s warning, although less direct than Utnapishtim’s, seems more foreboding: “You want to be a god and lord it over Rome, Augustus? Just remember that the price of godhood is to surrender your manhood; the gateway into the pantheon of the immortals is death.”

The Great Flood and the metamorphosis of the human race

So this is what the poem says: the cosmos is ruled by gods who, if they take a shine to you, are likely to turn you into something you don’t want to be just so they can hang onto you. And the world is ruled by kings who like to think they are gods. The good thing about kings is that they come – and they go. Things change – if things seem bad now, they might be better in a bit (and vice versa).

This view, which pervades the poem, provides the context for Ovid’s account of the Great Flood, which shows how incredibly fickle the immortal gods can be: one minute they are basking in the worship of mortal man, the next minute they are destroying every living thing because one man behaved badly. To this extent, the Graeco-Roman gods are not very different from those in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The sole survivors of the Great Flood beget tough offspring.

But the significance of the flood story lies in what makes it distinctive, not in the ways it resembles the earlier account. The most distinctive feature of Ovid’s flood story, it seems to me, is the way in which the human race is renewed afterward. The only two survivors, Deucalion and Pyrrha, are too old to procreate, but they despair at the thought of being the last people on Earth. So with divine help they create sons and daughters by flinging “the bones of their Mother [Earth]” over their shoulders. These are stones, which then undergo a metamorphosis from stone into flesh and bone. Lest we overlook the significance of this, Ovid points it out: “So the toughness of our race, our ability to endure hard labour, and the proof we give of the source from which we are sprung.”

This toughness and durability allows mankind to endure all the inevitable chances and changes of life. The rest of the poem illustrates just how constant these changes are. If Ovid seems to end the poem with a warning to Caesar Augustus, the King-Who-Would-Be-God, his message to the rest of us mere mortals is more encouraging: “We are tough, we can endure whatever life throws at us. Be strong, endure. In the eternal flux of the cosmos, this is what makes us who we are.”

Coming up: the Biblical account of the Great Flood

Now that we have taken a good look at the stories of the Great Flood in pagan literature, I hope we will be able to see the Biblical account in Genesis with fresh eyes, so that we can discern the significant ways in which the Bible story differs from these others.

As I start looking at Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s famous 1891 encyclical, I’ll first summarize/paraphrase what the encyclical says, paragraph by paragraph, then analyze the way Pope Leo presents his argument, and finally offer my own commentary on it. The first two focus on what is being said, and the last is my own personal response to it. This is a method I recommend to anyone who wants to give an important work a fair reading — in fact, it’s something that I have always tried to teach my students: understand first, and withhold judgment until you are sure you really do understand.

This is the whole idea behind the 4-step method of reading with understanding that I’ve propounded elsewhere on this blog. Why start with summary? Because it forces me to boil down the argument to its essential parts — but I don’t want to oversimplify it, so sometimes my “summary” is really more of a paraphrase. I don’t want to skip over any really essential ideas. If you try this yourself, you’ll find that putting something (accurately) into your own words is a great exercise, one that forces you to think about what has really been said and also helps you to remember it in detail afterward, as well as come to grips with the claims being made, and their importance. In other words, it helps you to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” the material (as an old Anglican collect says we should do with Scripture). So don’t rely on my summaries — they are no substitute for reading the document, but you may find that they help you understand it.

My analysis is intended to help you see how the logic of Leo’s argument fits together — we need to understand not only what he is saying, but also why he is saying it that way, and not some other. Doing this allows us to see how the argument unfolds and avoid skipping over points that may seem insignificant at the time, so that by the time we reach the end we can see how the whole thing hangs together.

The commentary I offer is meant to stir up your own minds, to get you thinking about the implications of what Leo is saying. I think you’ll find that, as we go along, there are lots of ways Rerum Novarum sheds new light on the problems and challenges of our own day, even though the world of 2015 is quite different than that of the 1890s. Much has changed, but human nature remains the same. We still have a lot to learn from this encyclical.

By the way, although I had originally intended simply to republish here the work I had already published on the other blog, in fact I’m doing completely fresh summary, analysis, and commentary. You might find it interesting to compare the new version with the original — I expect somethings will look a bit different to me, three years after I first took a serious look at this encyclical.

Summary, §1-11

Today we’re looking at the first eleven paragraphs (1-17 in the New Advent translation), which begin to lay the foundation upon which Leo will build.

A problem that cannot be ignored

Before he even gets to the “rights and duties of capital and labor,” Leo lays a foundation for his argument.

1. The passion for revolution, both political and economic, has resulted in a host of new evils, widening the gap between the rich and the working poor, and even causing a general decline in morals. Things have gotten so bad that these problems are preying on everyone’s minds, especially those in a position to regulate them.

2. Since I [i.e., Leo] have already written encyclicals on similar topics touching on the political sphere, I thought it would be appropriate now to write something concerning the condition of workers, in order to refute false teaching and clarify the principles that should guide any actions in this matter, so that just reason should prevail over political rhetoric. Because it is such a tricky question, many rabble-rousers have been confusing ordinary workers in order to lead them astray for their own dastardly purposes.

3. One thing we all should agree on is the fact that something needs to be done about working conditions. In the 18th century, the medieval trade guilds were finally abandoned, and the world itself seems to have abandoned any Christian social principles, leaving workers unprotected. The wealthy few, ruled by greed, now own everything, including the usurious institutions that now have turned workers, who own nothing, into wage slaves.

The claims of socialism

4. The socialists say that the way to fix this is to do away altogether with private property, and let the State hold everything in trust for everyone, so that everyone can have an equal share. There are two things wrong with this “solution,” though: first, if no one can own anything, the workers will be even more wretched than they already are; second, to do away with private property robbing from those who currently are property owners, itself an immoral and unjust act, and cause social and political chaos.

Refutation of socialist claims: The right to private property

5. The reason people work for pay is to provide for themselves and their families — whether they use that pay for their immediate needs or, through thrift, manage to save some of it to buy property and other durable goods. Therefore, property is something a man has earned through his own efforts, the fruit of his toil, and truly his own possession by right. The socialists, in doing away with private property, thus harm the worker by robbing him of the just fruit of his toil and denying him the right to dispose of it as he sees fit. This is completely unjust, it violates the natural right to own property.

6. Man shares other animals’ instincts for self-preservation and the propagation of his species, both of which can be achieved using resources immediately at hand. But the very thing that distinguishes Man, his faculty of Reason, gives Man the right, peculiar to his race alone, to own things not just for the moment but over the long term.

7. This becomes even clearer if we take a closer look at human nature. Because Man’s faculty of reason allows to understand many things, including the implications for the future of actions taken in the present, Man rules himself (under the providence of God) by the rational choices he makes, both with respect to his present needs and to those that will recur in the future. And since man’s needs recur, Nature provides a resource to supply those needs — the earth itself, with the abundance it provides. And since Man provided for his own needs long before there was any State, there really is no need for the State to provide for him.

A possible objection forestalled

8. Acknowledging that God gave the earth for the use of all mankind is not to say that He intended us to possess it collectively; it simply means that He did not designate particular men to own it. He leaves this to human enterprise to work out. Even when the earth is parceled out to particular private owners, it still serves the needs of all, since those who are not landowners nevertheless procure the fruits of the earth with the wages earned as remuneration for their labor. Thus private ownership of property does not interfere with anyone’s opportunity to enjoy the fruits of that property.

Concluding the first point: Private ownership is strongly warranted

9. Thus it is clear that private ownership of the land follows the law of nature. Land is most fruitful when man cultivates it by means of his own ingenuity and toil; when he does so, he truly makes the land his own, and it is only just that he should, in fact, own it.

10. Amazingly there are those who deny the logic of this, so obvious as to be virtually self-evident, and instead attempt to revive outmoded theories, allowing that men may use the earth and its fruits but not possess it. They can’t see that in asserting this they rob a man of the just fruits of his labor, namely all the improvements he has made to the land. Where is the justice in allowing him to toil and then giving the fruits of his toil to others?

11. So it makes sense that by and large, contrary to what these dissenters claim, humankind everywhere, throughout history, has acknowledged what natural law argues: that private property is in accord with human nature and provides for a peaceful common life. All just civil law agrees. And divine law concurs, for it severely forbids coveting what belongs to another.

Analysis

Finding common ground

Lincoln died 30 years before Rerum Novarum, but his view sounds remarkably like Pope Leo’s. It was just common sense.

[1-2] Leo begins by justifying why the Roman pontiff is meddling in what might seem to be secular affairs. Ostensibly this letter, like all papal encyclicals, is addressed to the bishops of the Church, but in fact it seems to be more of an open letter addressed to the world at large, something really unprecedented. He will not simply be “preaching to the choir.”

The problems, not only of the wretched condition of workers, but also those created by the socialist “solution,” were widespread, preying on everyone’s minds, including that of the Vicar of Christ. The aim of Marxist socialism was, and remains, first to destroy all existing society, and later to rebuild it according to socialist principles. The Pope suggests that those who purport to want to represent the workers are being disingenuous; their true purpose is not to improve their lot in the short term, but to bring about complete chaos. He wants to clarify the matter, so that their lies will become more apparent.

[3] So he begins with something that everyone can agree on: conditions for most workers in the industrialized world are terrible. The greedy, wealthy few have reduced their workers to being virtually wage-slaves. At the same time, usurious lending practices, long and universally condemned as immoral, have now become quite common, accepted. It’s a perfect storm of badness. [4] But how do you survive the perfect storm? Well, Leo is going to show that it’s not by throwing everyone into the maelstrom, as the socialists would have it. At first glance, socialism’s claim to level the playing field may be attractive — the communists will make an unfair world fair. But, as Leo points out, It wouldn’t be “fair” at all, it would cause more injustice. It would, in fact, violate the basic moral law that one may not use evil means to achieve a good outcome.

Natural justice

[5] But it’s not just the means (robbing property owners of their property) that is evil, it’s the end itself — creating a world in which no one owns anything. This is Leo’s biggest point, which he is going to spend some time on. [6-7] And he will make his point by arguing from natural law. This is important, because one does not have to be a religious believer of any kind to recognize the soundness of his argument. And that argument is that it is human nature to make provision for the future — animals don’t do this, only humans do — and the principle means that man uses to provide for his future (and that of his posterity) is to possess the very land he uses to provide for his present needs. This is the very thing that makes a man something more than an animal, in fact it is what makes him human. To deny him the ability to own property is essentially to dehumanize him. (I covered this understanding of human nature in an earlier post on the true nature of human freedom). Then he makes, in passing, a point that actually is quite important: a man’s right to provide for himself takes priority — both literally and figuratively — over any right of the State to regulate the disposition of nature’s goods. Literally, man was around, fending for himself, long before there was any “State” to protect him. Morally, also, the individual’s right comes before that of the State.
[8] Next, Leo takes a moment to head off a potential objection: “But God gave the earth to all mankind as a whole, not to any particular man.” He points out that even if some people own land and others do not, ultimately, we all live off the land. Some earn their bread directly through their agricultural toil (farmers) and others indirectly, by using their wages (also the fruit of their toil) to purchase the food they need, but the same earth provides for both. So private land ownership doesn’t really deprive anyone.

What it means to “own” something

[9] His next point is one that I found very striking when I first read it: when a man works a piece of land to produce something — a crop, a house, whatever — he places his stamp on it, makes it something more than it was, makes the land his own. This is what is meant by “ownership.” It’s not a legal concept at all — it’s a moral concept. And moral law, being immutable, always trumps positive (civil) law.

Socialism is at odds with all morality

[10] By this point, Leo has made a very convincing argument that it would simply be wrong to deny a man the opportunity to make the land his own (private property), and I would certainly agree, as most readers will, that it’s amazing anyone would deny this. [11] But to lend additional moral authority to his argument, Leo points out that private ownership of property is amply warranted: 1) by natural law, 2) by all (just) civil law, and 3) by Divine Law, citing the commandment against coveting a neighbor’s possessions. God does not forbid private property — quite the contrary, He forbids us to be jealous of those who have private property. By now it should be clear that the socialists with their “outmoded theories” are railing against all dictates of reason, custom, and religion.

Because, of course, the socialists preach the exact opposite of Divine Law — they stir up the Have-Nots to make them jealous of the Haves, trying to whip them into rage in which they will rob everyone of any private property.

He is not yet done laying the foundation of his argument, based on natural law. In the following section, §12-18 in the Vatican English version, he will go on to discuss the role of the family in society, a topic closely tied to his argument about the individual’s rights. Only after he has done this will he move on to speak specifically about labor relations.

Next time: §12-18 Summary and analysis

I’ll leave my commentary until after his discussion of the family, so in my next post on Rerum Novarum I’ll summarize and analyze §12-18.

One of my favorite kinds of speculative fiction is the time travel tale, not the H. G. Wells sort of thing that takes you into a distant, purely speculative future, but the kind that takes a modern person and sends him (or her) into the past. The earliest piece of time travel literature that I can recall reading was an Classics Illustrated version of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which I read probably at age ten or eleven. (I had already been introduced to King Arthur several years earlier, through a Golden Book storybook based on Disney’s The Sword in the Stone.)

Imagining past lives

Time travel stories allow us to visit the past in our imagination, but we are always conscious that we are visitors, outsiders — and therein lies the limitation of the genre. It is always more interested in commenting on (or even passing judgment on) the past, rather than showing it to us as it had been lived. When I was reading A Connecticut Yankee, I was more interested in the world Twain was ridiculing than I was in the show-off shenanigans of his Yankee. Twain had a beef with the romanticization of the past, which he believed had helped cause the American Civil War, so he wasn’t too kind to King Arthur. I found this irritating rather than illuminating.

In my teens, I also read a number of historical novels, mostly about medieval English royalty. I enjoyed the details of historical setting and circumstance, but there again I was aware of the irritating anachronism inherent in the enterprise. I didn’t particularly enjoy the way modern authors seemed to think that twelfth century England was interesting chiefly because of the dynastic struggles of the Plantagenets — I’m sure people living in those days were concerned about such things only insofar as they had a real effect on their daily lives.

Later, I got a very different view of medieval life and concerns, by reading stories actually written in the twelfth century. Now that was (time) tripping! These stories, at first seemed strange to me. I guess I was experiencing first hand the truth of that saying: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” To understand such a story, I had to get inside the mind of a twelfth century reader (or writer) and try to understand not only their day-to-day concerns but also the furniture of their imaginations. To the extent that I succeeded, the literature really did transport me to a world lost in time.

Homer’s epics take me to an even stranger, more primitive world, different from our own in so many ways, and yet his over-sized heroic figures seem to embody universal human traits in a marvelous way. That, I believe, is why they are, in a peculiar way, timeless. As foreign as ancient Mycenaean Greece is to us today, Homer’s stories somehow manage both to embody that age perfectly and yet transcend the limitations of history and the particularities of culture. That is a mark of Homer’s genius — not every ancient epic manages that kind of transcendence. I can understand the motives of Homer’s Achilles or Odysseus — or, for that matter Sophocles’ Oedipus — in a way that I can’t really sympathize with Gilgamesh or some other ancient heroes, who seem to lack a truly human dimension.

Touching the past

The bronze blade has crumbled, but the gold hilt remains as bright as when it was last grasped by some Mycenaean hero 3,500 years ago.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), I’ve also long been fascinated with archaeology, particularly of the ancient Mediterranean world. I first discovered this fascinating field as a seven-year-old, after a traveling encyclopedia salesman gave us the A volume of the World Book Encyclopedia as a sample. (I promptly read it cover to cover, and fell in love with archaeology and, to a lesser extent, anthropology.) I’ve since had a number of opportunities to actually walk the streets of the ancient past, in Spain and Italy. Thanks to the painstaking work of archaeologists, I’ve walked the streets of Pompeii — lost to the world for nearly two thousand years, and then brought back to light, stunningly preserved — and descended into the ancient cemetery that lies beneath St Peter’s Basilica, imagining the families that picnicked there long ago with the relics of departed loved ones. I love to read about archaeological discoveries that shed new light on the ancient world.

One such recent discovery, described in this recent news story, reminded me that Homer’s epics, wreathed though they were in myth and legend even in his day, nevertheless take place in a world that was still familiar to the poet who described them (although he lived several centuries after the events he described).

Archaeologists digging at Pylos, an ancient city on the southwest coast of Greece, have discovered the rich grave of a warrior who was buried at the dawn of European civilization.

He lies with a yardlong bronze sword and a remarkable collection of gold rings, precious jewels and beautifully carved seals. Archaeologists expressed astonishment at the richness of the find and its potential for shedding light on the emergence of the Mycenaean civilization, the lost world of Agamemnon, Nestor, Odysseus and other heroes described in the epics of Homer.

Agamemnon, Nestor, Odysseus — those guys are all buddies of mine, whose homes I’ve visited, not by touring archaeological sites, but by way of the time machine created by Homer. I’ve lived through their travails with them, grieved with them and for them. No travel agent can provide that kind of experience. And even though archaeology can allow us, literally, to touch the past, it cannot allow us to live it. Ancient literature, however, when read well, can do just that.

Timeless truth

This may be one reason Homer’s epics were so highly regarded, even in his own day. The ancient Greeks believed that the best was already behind them, and they sought to learn from the past, where greater wisdom lay than anywhere in their contemporary world. Homer’s heroic poems capture the past so masterfully that Greeks in following centuries actually regarded them as a kind of encyclopedia or textbook that they used to educate their children. This is why, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates objects to “the lies of the poets” — every son of a prominent family was steeped in Homeric literature from a young age, a practice that Socrates (both the historical Socrates, and Plato’s literary character) believed filled their heads with dangerous ideas, not just of bravado and heroism but warped ideas about the gods. (Curiously, this puts Mark Twain and Plato on the same side.) One of the most important things Plato is doing in The Republic is proposing a better way of educating young men destined to be leaders. He objected not so much to fiction as to false ideals, which is why he has Socrates invent truer fictions.

Keep your Tardis, this is my time travel device of choice.

Today, I don’t think we need to worry that Homer will warp the minds of our young — quite the opposite. Today, in fact, we may have the opposite struggle — to get young people (and older ones, as well) to see how much truth is conveyed by these ancient tales of legendary figures. Few people in the modern world appreciate the real value of imaginative literature. Time travel stories, though, remain popular, and one of TV’s most popular characters is the time-traveling Doctor Who, so there may yet be hope.

I’ll be returning to my series on ancient epic, by the way, so get the Tardis warmed up for a return to Augustan Rome and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I’m also planning a post on some of my favorite time travel fiction, including Jack Finney’s Time and Again, and Andrew M. Seddon’s Ring of Time.

Retired from college teaching, I'm now a freelance editor and writer living in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. When I'm not working for other writers, I'm busy writing books, novels, and short stories, or blogging about literature and the moral imagination on my blog, A Catholic Reader.